Both students and staff getting tech upgrades at Waukegan District 60

An iPad is used in a Maryland school for online-based class discussion.

An iPad is used in a Maryland school for online-based class discussion. (Joe Crocetta / AP)

Emily K. ColemanNews-Sun

More Chromebooks and iPads are working their way into classrooms as Waukegan School District 60 looks to upgrade its technology and data use on the administrative side as well, district officials said.

The district recently completed upgrades to its network that ensured every classroom has wireless access to the Internet and much faster speeds, said Rich Pattison, associate superintendent of information technology services. Schools have also been rolling out the expanded technology program that has placed a Chromebook in the hands of every eighth grader through high school senior.

The pilot programs at Washington Elementary School and Abbott Middle School also mean that every student at those schools has their own Chromebook or iPad, depending on their grade, Pattison said. The purchase of an additional 1,015 Chromebooks and 510 iPads approved by the board earlier this month means that the other schools will have 10 Chromebooks for each second- through fifth-grade class and five iPads for each kindergarten and first-grade classroom.

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On the administrative side, the District 60 school board was set this week to consider a $49,000 contract with CSC Consulting, which would be charged with looking at how the district does business in the human resources, registration and finance departments and improving those processes, said Adrian DeLeon, the consulting firm's vice president and chief strategy officer.

The firm has also proposed a second phase of work that would be approved at a later date focused on building a single interactive dashboard where board members, administrators and school staff would be able to access and work with various data sets, including attendance, expenses, budgets and test scores, said Nick Freeman, the firm's vice president and chief eLearning officer.

"Data is no good to us if it's just telling us a story," Freeman said. "We have to be sure that we're actually putting a plan behind those data analytics to ensure that we're moving in the right direction."

Superintendent Theresa Plascencia, who officially took the helm of the 17,000-student district on July 1, has made updating how the district uses technology a top priority. Data is needed to assess where the district is academically, where it needs to focus improvements and to assess whether the changes it's implementing are being used and are working, she has said.

The district had originally intended to hire a full-time person to do this work but found it is a hard position to fill, Plascencia said in an interview Friday. They had intended to offer the job to Freeman, who was then with Chicago Public Schools but soon to be hired by CSC Consulting, but couldn't compete with salaries he was being offered elsewhere.

The district had allocated $90,000 plus benefits to the position, she said.

As the search continued, the district was approached by CSC Consulting, which offered to do the work for $49,000, Plascencia said. Going with a consulting firm made sense financially and seemed even more perfect when Freeman left CPS and joined CSC Consulting.

The district did not look at other firms, in part because of Freeman and in part because Plascencia was familiar with DeLeon's data background, she said. DeLeon had been a data strategist at Chicago Public Schools while Plascencia was there, though she said she did not work with him directly.

The school board is also set to vote on whether to purchase software designed to manage the district's business operations, including human resources records as well as budgeting and financial work, Pattison said. The software and associated services would cost about $558,000.

Much of these operations, including payroll, is still being done on paper, and employees can't access their information to make sure it's right or make changes, he said. The district is also doing budget projections manually.

"Things that are very standard in today's world aren't getting done," Pattison said.